the beginning is brutal
by CampionSayn
Summary: Don't get drunk after high school graduation with a friend pining after another friend with lowered inhibitions. This is one of the things Orihime took away from the end of high school. And other things.


She had not meant to get pregnant, and certainly not soaking drunk after graduation by Ichigo.

They hadn't been in a relationship, they had just, she supposed, reacted to being excited and scared about the future and Ichigo must have been rather lonely since his Substitute Shinigami duties had slowed to a trickle since the war ended. He hadn't seen Rukia in months.

Then her periods, which were barely there but always on time, stopped. Then came the nausea.

She went to Ryuuken-sensei rather than the Kurosaki clinic.

Orihime needed a place that would give her all the information and tell her all of her options after all. Ishida-kun might not have gotten along very well with Ryuuken-sensei, but the man was always up front with his patients.

She's aware of herself almost floating outside her own body when he tells her with no hesitation, "I think you're about six weeks along."

* * *

"You don't know?!"

"I don't know. That's all I've got."

It was surprisingly calming, watching other people freak out more than she had over the course of three days as she drank green tea and stared up at the blank black sky above Las Noches.

Sado-kun drank tea with her, one hand rubbing her back to keep her calm as the oddest collection of her friends paced about, some in agitation and some in a kind of daze that she was entirely familiar with when she wasn't vomiting into her toilet or avoiding all of her friends that weren't ghosts.

She'd told Chad because he was entirely better to handle such information than, say, Tatsuki-who would have gone after Ichigo with a hatchet and forced him to marry her.

Ishida-kun would have given the both of them a wilting look before dressing Ichigo down like a thundering god of vengeance.

Keigo and Mizuiro would have gone into shock and congratulated her, respectively.

No, no, going to Chad and the people she knew on the other side was better.

"Don't humans have, like, things you can do when things like this happen?" Menoly questioned, perched on the edge of the roof, chewing on the yogurt candy Chad had brought along with him when Orihime asked him to come along to just have a break from thinking too hard about the real world.

"Uh-huh," she hummed, accepting a biscuit that Nel handed her while she practically devoured the thin mints that none of them seemed to like very much, but found rather endearing anyway, "Ryuuken-sensei gave me a bunch of pamphlets about those options."

"Which are?" Grimmjow questioned, pacing around in annoyance with how stupid Ichigo had to be to get the one girl pregnant that he probably _ wasn't _ aiming to get pregnant at any time.

"Adoption, abortion, or keeping it."

"I don't suppose you have a preference?"

She took a bite from the biscuit and looked over to Loly, the Arrancar positively fascinated with looking at Orihime's belly, probably remembering all the passages from the books Orihime had brought along for anyone who didn't understand what pregnancy entailed. She'd been grinning like a shark ever since she got to the passages about the last stretch of carrying; how fat she'd get if she carried to term, all the infections and complications that came from her body tending to and building up another.

Any other person would have taken offense, but Orihime could see her thoughts, clear as day.

How could she even think about going through something so dangerous when it could die just as easily as it could kill her?

* * *

"It didn't hurt."

She means, of course, Ryuuken-sensei giving her an injection to help process the rotting matter that had festered inside of her.

She'd made it to about four months and then had the strangest feeling of something having changed.

Shunou and Tsubaki had been the ones to tell her to make an appointment as soon as possible.

She hadn't wanted to go alone, but thought she didn't have much of a choice. Orihime _alone_ had been almost the _usual_ thing in those four months, everyone else looking into college, having gotten into college, or working at jobs to support themselves and then see what would happen next.

Chad had shown up that morning with sweet tea for her stomach and whipped cream because the cravings had started and she'd made the request with the promise to pay him back, even when he always refused her money.

But he hadn't gone with her, she remembered. He'd been on his way to the gym and tried to use the excuse of talking to her as a stall. He'd only left when she'd pinched him and told him to put on his big boy pants, swallowing down a mouthful of whipped cream like it was delicious, when in fact it felt like poison as he'd walked away smiling and she'd had to wait until he was out of sight to vomit into her neighbor's bushes.

He sat beside her bed, being there when she'd woken up and in the clothes she remembered he was going to wear for his first tournament in boxing _ (which she knew he didn't like, even after getting everyone's assurance and blessing about it) _ that happened to take place at the same time she'd made the appointment so he wouldn't worry.

The injection hadn't hurt her, but she'd passed out from the infection the dead fetus had given her on her way out the door of the hospital after she'd already expelled what she could.

She hit her head, which was why Ryuuken had to call her emergency contact.

"You didn't miss your match, did you?"

"I did, but this is more important."

"I'm fine," she said, even if they both knew it was a lie; her face was pallid, her hair limp, the bruising from the IV bags the doctors gave her to clear up the infection made it seem like she'd driven nails up her arms, "You shouldn't miss your match because of this happening. It's not a big deal."

"I didn't want to do it anyway," he pointed out, blunt as brass and brave enough to lean forward and wipe some of the dried blood off of the crook of her arm with an anti-bacterial swab, "And you just had a miscarriage. I'd call that a big deal."

"Not really," she mumbled, getting comfortable in the bed regardless, and not noticing at all when he tossed away the swab only to pick up her hand in both of his own, trying to warm it up. She didn't and wouldn't notice, but she felt so cold, "One in four end this way. That's what Ryuuken-sensei said."

"…Ah."

"Yeah, I was surprised, too."

* * *

Ichigo never knew about her pregnancy.

She never told him, on account of there being no need to derail his life and make him feel guilty about something she was reasonably sure she would never have told him about, anyway. And the universe seemed to agree with her, because he never brought up that one night of drunken neediness that had him falling all over himself to seem like he wasn't avoiding her for weeks after that, when he _absolutely_ was.

The following spring he decided to move into the barracks of Soul Society because he wasn't getting what he thought to be a full life. He couldn't handle the humdrum slog of the every day like his friends could. His genetics and personality wouldn't allow it, and neither would the fact that Soul Society still needed a lot of cleaning up if it was ever going to function properly. (Not repeat the fucked up hellscape they broke into the save Rukia, once upon a time.)

She could understand, even if she and everybody else wouldn't see him around that often.

Although, _Kon_ seemed happy about it, deciding to take up med school to help out around the clinic and make Yuzu happy and Karin, at least, relatively at peace with the idea.

As though to make the transition of losing one person to the Seireitei less traumatic, Renji took up a more permanent Gigai in the living world, putting in for a long vacation to "try new things" as he would put it to Byakuya while sweating bullets and trying not to cower while his boss read over his terrible handwriting and Rukia gave him a thumbs-up behind her brother's back.

Ishida called it freeloading, as the redhead moved in with the Quincy to "cheer him on" as he got a line in with a top clothing designer from Paris that had a branch in Japan. Which Ishida wouldn't admit to needing, when he absolutely did; constantly run down with exhaustion filling out commission orders and answering to department heads and avoiding his father brow beating him into going into medicine. Renji turned into his rock, regardless of the fact that he broke three coffee makers in the first month of them living together alone.

Orihime and Chad tried to let them all believe they were actually fooling anyone with those stories when it became especially obvious Ichigo left for Rukia and Renji left for Ishida.

Not that they could really be called ones to talk when they were both working part-time jobs to share an apartment right around the block from Urahara, and also working to improve conditions in Hueco Mundo on the weekends. Their apartment always open to the stray Arrancars they'd made fairly good friends with through the shared secret they all had with Inoue; they were welcome to come and go as they pleased, so long as they tried not to eat them out of house and home.

Orihime worked at the bakery three blocks over and Chad worked as a personal trainer at the gym (where he still constantly got hit up to perform in actual paying events, but always passed on). She constantly brought home bread that nobody bought, saving the cinnamon ones for Chad and always eating anything with coconut in their shared evenings after dinner. He always seemed to cook more than her, though they were both fine with that since it was always delicious and they were both happy to fill up the silence with talking about their day and just soaking in each other's company.

It wasn't the future or present any of them expected, but they weren't by any means discontent.


End file.
